I think Ali’s perspective is valuable, because she’s a product of a certain culture, and has thoroughly rejected that culture. But that perspective carries a danger of the “zeal of the converted” — I have to wonder whether her policy recommendations are the result of a rational and principled analysis, or merely the product of her (understandable) antipathy toward the Muslim world.

And I also wonder whether she’s really rejected the Islamist view as much as she thinks. I find myself wanting to say to her, I really appreciate how you’ve rejected the Islamist worldview in favor of the Western one, but here’s the thing — in the West, we don’t react to things we dislike by trying to ban them, we don’t use the law as a club to beat ideas into submission.

Ali reminds me a little of Orson Welles’ Nazi character in “The Stranger,” who tries to pose as a non-Nazi by claiming Nazis are so evil that the only solution is to exterminate them all.